For a while we encouraged Peter to write an entry every day as well, and he dutifully recorded his lack of excitement for the exercise, writing at most a couple of sentences. Then Betsy discovered a diary format in another adoptive mom’s blog. It used a fill-in-the-blank formula that began Today I felt mad, or glad, or sad and scared when … followed by three lines for each response. Betsy made a binder for Peter with photocopied sheets of these fill-in-the-blank forms so he could write about his feelings every day.
For the next two months Peter cooperated. Much of what he wrote was touching and also hard for us to read:
Today I felt sad when … I thought at the start of the day about my first mother, that she left me.
I am thankful for … I have strict parents; I have nice parents
Today I felt glad when … Dad picked me up at Daycare! I was lonely by myself.
Today I felt scared when … dad is going away for five days because people have left me before forever!
3 things I like about myself … I have nice skin!; I am handsome; I controlled my anger!; I told the truth today; I was kind
I am thankful … to have a kitten; To have a father; To have a mother
Somewhere in his litanies of thankfulness, Peter wrote “I got to watch Star Wars. All of it.” Peter loved Star Wars the way I had loved the Biggles adventure stories as a boy in Jamaica, raiding the colonial library. Biggles was a British spy who did glamorous things that were forbidden to me by my parents or the larger world: he pointed guns at bad guys, he said “damn” and “what the devil,” he smoked cigarettes, he flew airplanes, he solved mysteries.
Of course the hero of Biggles Investigates and Biggles Sorts it Out would have let himself be tortured to death before he ever said, as Luke does to Darth Vader, “Search your feelings, Father.” When Peter echoed Luke in his journal, writing “I felt my feelings today,” Betsy and I were relieved and hopeful, though I felt like a hypocrite for steering Peter in that direction when I still identified more with Biggles than Luke, and suspected my dad would as well.
As a way of getting through to Peter, Betsy wanted me to reveal some of my own difficult feelings to the boys. One day at dinner she asked me to tell a story about my first family.
“What first family?” said Bohdan.
“Mom means my family when I lived with your brother Jeremy and Jeremy’s mother.” I told them a story about Jeremy when he was four, wearing a white sailor outfit and getting his picture taken. I didn’t mention trying to kick a car that day because it cut me off as I carried Jeremy out of the photographer’s studio.
“He had chubby cheeks and he was ticklish, just like you.” No one was satisfied with this story.
“Dad has hurts that he doesn’t talk about either,” Betsy said, as a prompt for me. We’d talked about how my opening up more in front of the kids might be helpful to them, especially to Peter, but I just wasn’t ready. I mumbled and continued to eat my dinner. The boys were distracted by looking at a baby picture of Jeremy that Betsy brought out.
My level of inexpressiveness reminded me again of my father’s, and it filled me with dread and anger at myself. As Peter wrote in his diary so often: “Today I felt mad when I had to tell about my feelings.”
Every city has an unspoken contract between pedestrians and vehicles that specifies what each party will tolerate from the other. For weeks in the early summer I’d been violating this contract. Instead of meekly letting drivers cut me off at four-way stops while they inched forward into the crosswalk, I continued walking at a uniform speed and thumped the back of their vehicles with my open hand. Usually this elicited hostile stares. Sometimes drivers, invariably male, gave me the finger. I gave it back to them. But there was no satisfaction in this DIY enforcement of the traffic laws. I arrived at home distracted and enraged, unable to face a blank screen or notebook.
One morning at the corner of Wolseley and Evanson, a silver Toyota truck rolled through the stop sign, forcing me to check slightly as I crossed the street. I whacked the side of the truck hard with my hand while continuing to walk to the other side.
The driver pulled over, slammed his door shut, and came charging at me. I’d stopped, filled with caffeinated self-righteousness, and at first noticed only that he was a short man. Then, as he got closer, I saw that he was short and powerfully built.
“What the fuck are you doing?” He was now within inches of me.
“You cut me off. You shouldn’t cut off pedestrians.” This sounded, even to me, like the whine of someone who types a lot. I looked to see if he was carrying a tire iron while part of me realized that it was too late for such worries.
“Ffffuh …” he bellowed, not a word but just pure anger, and then his hands were on my throat. He rocked me back and forth. I could see the shaving nicks on his face now, and felt the callouses on his hands. I’d never been in a fight. I had no idea what to do other than stand up straight, because I clung to the notion that my height was an advantage, and I knew that I shouldn’t let him put me on the ground. But my hands stayed at my sides.
“Get off me. I’ve memorized your licence number,” I squeaked out, my voice reedy.
He grunted and let go, flinging his hands down to his sides with disgust, and headed to his truck. A wave of violated dignity and relief rushed through me.
“I’m calling the cops. You attacked me.”
“You do that,” he said, with his back to me, getting into the small truck without ducking his squat body. I stood still at the corner and watched him drive down the street and turn, probably to a construction site just around the corner. My hands shook and at home I stared at a dark bruise forming above my collarbone.
I called Betsy at work and told her what had happened. I omitted telling her how often I’d been smacking vehicles, how angry I’d been before and afterward, how humiliated I felt after this last encounter. I admitted being scared. She asked me to describe the vehicle in detail.
It was Betsy’s day to pick up the boys after school, and on the way there she found the silver Toyota and methodically deflated the tires, based on the description I’d rattled off.
“What if someone saw you, Mom?” said Peter when she told the story at dinner. He and Bohdan had listened with close attention. They were awed and impressed by the vandalism, that their straight-arrow mother had done it, and filled with the spirit of self-righteous indignation that had caused the incident in the first place.
“Dad did something dangerous, and so did I,” said Betsy. While she told the story I’d felt a moment of gratitude and love. And yet I was also ungrateful.
I told the whole story to the members of my poetry workshop, who were all women, and they thought it was cute. It showed how devoted Betsy was to me. But all I could think of was that Betsy had played the hero, Biggles to my colonial flunky, and that the boys, who had once thought I could lift up a car single-handed, had transferred that hero-worship to their mother. I kept imagining what it would have been like for the boys to see me clench my fists and glare at the truck driver so he scurried away, unable to touch me.
II
At home in my study, I stared out the window, watching for the hunched-up old lady in a black shroud who hobbled down the street at three o’clock every afternoon with her middle-aged daughter.
It was late June, and I was trying to write a review of a book I didn’t like. The author had once written good books, but now wrote imitations of himself from that earlier period. How to say this? How to make myself care about the diplomacy for less than $50?
As the school day wound down I always felt anxious. At age seven, Bohdan rarely had problems in school, although he had contributed to my worries before: in grade one he and a classmate urinated all over the walls of the washroom, and they also tried flushing a basketball down the toilet; in grade two Bohdan pushed the same boy’s head into a brick wall as part of an argument.
Now nine, Peter frequently had problems in school, in ways that were sometimes predictable and
other times surprised me. If I was leaving town, or we were about to go on vacation, or for no discernible reason, Peter might have an incident that would trigger a phone call from the principal: he had opened up filing cabinets containing confidential student records and rifled through them; he’d inserted bent paper clips into electrical outlets in his classroom; he’d stolen food from the special refrigerator reserved for the teachers. Both Peter and Bohdan had behavioural reporting systems with their teachers. Peter got a number between one and five, with five being an excellent day. He lost a privilege when the number fell below four, and gained one from four up. Bohdan’s teacher wrote a paragraph describing his day.
At 3:15 the computer alarm reminded me to gear up for the boys’ return. I began my gearing up ritual by listening to a Bill Evans tune from his early period, something with the distinctly classical sound that I liked, clinical and intensely emotional, like Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. Sometimes I stretched and breathed slowly while listening. After that I usually recited the Twenty-Third Psalm to myself, or a poem; my shrink had recommended recordings by a mindfulness guru with a squeaky, grating voice, so I’d invented my own exercises. I checked the weather in Emerald Isle, North Carolina, and imagined what the beach would be like in July next year.
The point of this routine was to make myself calm and receptive. My shrink said I needed to react in less volatile ways, to not let myself be provoked into losing my temper, either by a bad behaviour report from a teacher, or Peter’s mood, or his deliberate attempts at provocation. My father had always become cold when he was angry at me, but I waxed hot. Now I wanted to be mindful.
On this particular day I listened to Evans playing “Someday My Prince Will Come,” then stretched rather quickly because I hated stretching. The telephone rang.
It was the principal. Peter had just gotten out of her office. He had apparently threatened to cut another boy’s face with a paper clip. This boy had been following Peter around the schoolyard before the incident. Peter asked him to go away, but he didn’t.
I asked the principal if it was a certain kid who’d been bothering Peter recently, taunting him until he reacted and came home with a bad report.
She said she knew that Peter had been bullied by this boy, which I was glad to hear. But I agreed that we’d talk to Peter about threatening other kids.
The side door opened. “Hi Dad!” It was Bohdan, loud, bouncing off the wall, almost falling down the steep basement stairs.
“Hi Bohdan. How was your day?”
“Good!”
“All right. Get your backpack emptied.”
A moment later Peter walked in. I greeted him and he turned away.
“Peter, let’s go talk in your room. Bohdan, you should get your snack ready.”
Peter and I sat on his bed. I put my hand on his shoulder and he shrugged it off. “Tell me what happened.”
“Max and another boy laughed at me. They followed me around.” Peter had to stop here because he was taking retching gasps of air and crying. “I went outside and they kept following me.”
“Did you tell them to leave you alone?”
“Yes I did. I was nice about it too. Max wouldn’t listen.” Peter lost his voice again. “I was on the play structure and Max laughed at me. I held up a paper clip and told him not to come any closer.”
“Did you threaten to cut Max with the clip?” I had to repress a smile.
“No. No. I told the principal I never said anything.”
“You know what Max is doing to you, Peter?”
“What?” He let me put my arm around him.
“He wants you to get in trouble. So he bugs you and bugs you until you react in a way that he can tattle. It’s really hard but you can’t lose your temper and threaten him by waving something around, not even a paper clip.”
“It’s not fair,” sobbed Peter.
“Listen. I believe you that you never said you’d cut him. But you can’t threaten anyone by making a gesture, even a kid who’s a total jerk. Something is hurt inside Max that makes him scared, so he behaves like an asshole. By the way you can’t use that language outside our house, but Max is an asshole. Doesn’t matter though — you still can’t threaten him, otherwise you’ll be the one who gets in trouble. And you’re right, it isn’t fair.” He leaned into me and relaxed, sobbing the whole time. I couldn’t protect him from whatever lurked in his past but I could hold him for now. It made me feel the same rush of fiercely protective love that I’d felt when we first met, when he had his Frankenstein bandage on his forehead and the baby fat still in his face.
A few days later, I got another call from school, this time about Bohdan. He’d hit his head on a bookshelf, and might need stitches.
“How are you doing?” I said when he came out to me in the hall.
“You can die from a cut in the head,” he said. “If you die, then you go to be with God.”
“Where did you hear that?”
Bohdan shrugged. “You go to be with God, in the God-place.”
“You mean heaven?”
“Yes, to heaven. Unless you get shotted twice. Then you stay buried in the ground, dead.”
“Why don’t you go to heaven if you’re shot twice?”
“You can only get shotted once.” I nodded and we set off to see the doctor.
Late in the afternoon we went by the daycare centre to pick up Peter. He’d heard what happened to Bohdan and was happy to see us. Bohdan was happy too. He hadn’t needed any stitches, just a bit of skin glue, and I’d bought him some candy to celebrate his good luck. The prospect of a concussion still worried me. But for the moment I was happy to have the boys safe beside me.
“Look at the sky,” I said to them. “Look at the beautiful blue sky, and the moon.”
“I don’t see the moon,” said Bohdan.
“Look,” said Peter, pointing. “Just above the trees. You can see the craters!”
“And do you see how beautiful the sky is?”
“Yes,” they both said. We walked home fast in the cold air.
When we got home I decided to tell Peter and Bohdan the story of my grandfather’s death. It didn’t make much sense, and maybe they were too young to hear it, but I needed to tell them. It was a story I wished my dad had told me early in my life. Maybe my sons would see how much they shared with their grandfather, even though our birth families were not the same and they saw him only once a year.
“He was the father of my father, your grandpa’s dad. He was killed by the government, by the police,” I said. “He was shot.”
“Why would police kill him?” asked Peter.
“Bad people ran the government. He was a Mennonite, which means he believed in God and spoke German. The government didn’t like that.”
“Why not?” said Bohdan.
“They wanted everyone to just believe in the leader whose name was Stalin. My grandfather lived in a country called the Soviet Union that no longer exists. Where they lived, where your grandpa was born, is now Ukraine.”
“So Grandpa is Ukrainian, like us?” said Peter.
“Yes.”
I didn’t tell them that my grandfather was like the hamster in Bohdan’s room, incapable of leaving the cage they put him in, or the cage of his own beliefs. He could have run from the authorities and maybe stayed alive at least for a while. But God was like alcohol for him, a substance that changed the chemistry of his brain, an illness.
I did tell them that Grandpa had lost his parents too; like them he was an orphan, and also like them he ended up with a loving family. I said that Grandpa had trouble talking about his feelings as well. Finding words for the pain you feel is hard.
III
It is striking how often earliest memories are painful ones. “Maurice is upset about any little noise — he’s afraid of bombs,” my father wrote in his diary in 1967, when we lived in Nigeria. I was five.
Dad had built a sandbox beside the driveway. I played in it with my Lego blo
cks and toy cars for hours every day under the shade of a huge flamboyant tree. Sometimes Dad helped me arrange the flamboyant seeds into roads, airports, a parliament, and my sister Crisy messed them up.
One day jets flew low overhead, and they didn’t look like the planes we took to Nigeria. At dinner I asked my father about them. He said they were air force planes. They were flying to Biafra to drop bombs and shoot people because Nigeria was at war with Biafra.
At night I thought about the planes, their menace. They were not like the soldiers, who were cheerful and friendly, waving at the roadside. At checkpoints the soldiers might have low, harsh voices, but then Dad gave them money and joked with them, using a few words in their language, and they were cheerful again. The planes were supposed to bomb people in Biafra, but what if they bombed us by mistake?
Now when I played in the sandbox I looked up at the sky every few minutes, or cocked my ear for the rushing sounds of their engines. When the planes flew over, I ran to the bathroom and latched the door on a place full of flies and bad smells, but it felt safe until the horrible noise went away.
When Jeremy was five, he and I drove for ten straight hours in a green Honda Civic from Winnipeg to southern Saskatchewan for a family gathering, taking only short breaks every two hours for bathroom, snacks, and caffeine. My mother’s family had rented a big A-frame cabin for the weekend in the Cypress Hills near Swift Current. The morning after our arrival about ten of us went for a walk in the scrub pine off the road. Jeremy liked to stamp around on his shoes, demonstrating his mastery of the ground beneath him. Somehow he stepped on a wasp nest under a rotting log and within seconds had been stung multiple times. He cried loudly and the bites swelled as I raced him to the Swift Current hospital, terrified he might be allergic. The stings and swellings are the only part of the day he remembers.
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